i-Vox voice organiser for Palm handhelds

There are things it's hard to do with a Palm
organiser. With any current handheld computer, for that matter. And one
of those things is taking ultra-quick notes.

Sure, you can fire up your
instant-on handheld, punch whatever button gives you the memo pad, and scribble
away in whatever mildly mangled script the thing wants you to use. You can
take notes that way as quickly as you could by jotting them down on a piece
of paper. But, as the salesmen always say, what if you have a brilliant
idea while you're driving? What then, eh? You use both hands to jot it down,
you're probably going to DIE! Yes, DIE!

But wait! The salesmen can save your life! With what, I hear you breathlessly
ask? Why, with a "voice organiser", of course!

A voice organiser, in its simplest form, is a little digital recorder.
A few buttons, to record and stop recording, play back, skip forward and
backward, and delete, and a couple of holes for the microphone and the speaker.
Press button, expound fabulous idea, press button again, maybe don't crash
car.

The simplest voice recorders only have enough memory for a very short
record time - 20 seconds or so. It's surprising how much you can fit into
a 20 second sound bite, though, and these low-spec units are sold as little
keyring toys. Here in Australia, for instance, you can grab a couple of
20 second recorders from places like Jaycar Electronics for less than $AU20 (they're catalogue numbers
XC0275 and XC0276, by the way).

The Shinei Sangyo i-Vox
goes rather further than these small-capacity recorders. It's got a hefty
eight minute record capability, and can hold up to 99 individual messages.
And it clips onto your Palm III or V series handheld. I checked out the
sexy see-through Palm V model. It costs $AU129.95.

Shinei Sangyo may not exactly be a household name, but they've been selling
i-Voxes for a while. Landware, makers of the rather good
GoType
Palm keyboards (I review one here), sold the
first model of i-Vox, calling it the goVox. The earlier model is the same
deal; a Palm cover with buttons on it, and no real connection with the Palm
it's attached to. The specifications are the same - up to 99 messages and
eight minutes of total record time.

Landware will be selling the new i-Vox too, shortly, according to their
goVox page.
They'll just call it the Palm V goVox.

Installation

The i-Vox runs on a couple of lithium button cells, which are easy enough
to install. Then you've just got to attach it to your Palm - although, of
course, it actually works fine all by itself.

In true real-estate-agent style, the manufacturers make a virtue of the
fact that the only thing that connects an i-Vox to a Palm is a plastic hinge.
You don't need to load any special software, they say. You don't need to
even turn on your Palm!

Well, yeah. You don't need to do either of those things to use a keyring
recorder, either. The lack of any electronic connection also means you can't
attach voice messages to Palm files, or sync messages to your PC, or do
anything else at all fancy with 'em. Adding proper connectivity and supporting
software would, of course, probably greatly increase the price of the gadget,
but it still has to be recognised that its "integration" is purely physical.

The Palm III i-Vox - or goVox, or whatever you want to call it - is handicapped
somewhat by its attachment method. It replaces the standard Palm III flip
cover, which isn't the most inspired piece of design in history in the first
place. A flip cover that's rather heavier than the plain plastic one is
a bit of a pain.

The Palm V i-Vox, on the other hand, takes advantage of the ambidextrous
design of the Palm V, and has a hinge with a pin on the side of it that
apes the shape of the V's stylus. You plug the pin into the left-hand stylus
slot, and the i-Vox is firmly anchored. This will irk left-handers, who
aren't going to be able to use the Palm with a flip cover blocking their
writing hand.

But if you're one of us clearly-superior right-handed ubermenschen, you'll
be fine.

The i-Vox, like other Palm covers, protects the front of the device quite
well. It also leaves the back of the Palm clear, so you don't have
to remove the recorder to plug the PDA into a sync cradle, or expansion
device.

Using it

Operating the i-Vox is simple enough. Press the record button to start
recording. Press it again when you're done. Use the skip buttons to shuffle
through the recorded messages; press delete to get rid of whatever one you
just chose to listen to, hold delete for a couple of seconds to delete every
message.

Sound quality

There are only two things that'll affect the quality of sound from a
gizmo like this - the recording quality, and the speaker. Tiny microphones
with decent quality are common, but many digital recorders use very low
sample rates, and many small playback devices have minuscule piezo speakers
like those used in watches, rather than proper magnet-and-coil drivers.

The I-Vox wins on both quality counts. Its speaker may be tiny - less
than an inch across - but it's a magnetic unit with a bit of midrange response,
not just treble. Piezos are very thin and very light and very cheap and
louder for a given power input, but they're tweeters only. You don't expect,
or need, any bass from a thing like this, of course, but you do want voice
quality that tends more towards telephone grade than tin-can-and-string.

The proper speaker means the i-Vox comes with a warning not to put it
on top of floppy disks or credit cards or other magnetic media, but in the
real world the titchy little magnet on this thing would have to try very
hard indeed to erase anything.

The i-Vox microphone's fine for recording ordinary speech, at distances
up to arm's length, when there isn't a lot of background noise. You're not
going to have much success in a crowded, busy office, or in a rattletrap
automobile. No omnidirectional mike can be expected to do any better than
this one does, really.

The recording quality is also perfectly good. You don't need much sample
rate for speech; phone quality is fine, and the i-Vox delivers.

Limitations

Realistically, I don't think it's likely that anybody's going to use
anything like the full 99 message capacity of an i-Vox, because the thing's
got no display. It's got the ability to give you instant access to
any message, but when all you've got is forward and backward buttons, you're
limited by the interface to using the thing like a base model tape-based
answering machine. You can skip to the first or last message, but not to
any particular message in the middle.

There's also no volume control, and no headphone socket. Discretion?
We don' need no steenkin' discretion!

Because of its no-integration design, the i-Vox also has absolutely no
security. It's a given that anybody with physical access to your computing
devices can, with a modicum of knowledge, do anything they want with them.
But most computing devices don't let them record an enthusiastic rendition
of the
Monty Python song of their choice, for you to unsuspectingly
play back in front of senior management.

The guts

Through the translucent case you can vaguely see the i-Vox's componentry,
but I had to extract five tiny screws to find out what the I-Vox was actually
using to do its work. The core of the thing is an Information Storage Devices
4004-08ME integrated sound chip (get the PDF datasheet
here), which has the flash memory and basic input-output hardware
built in. There's an Atmel AT89C2051 microcontroller (datasheet
here)
to tie it all together.

Overall

If you get a brilliant, zillion-dollar idea while you're driving, and
you're afraid you'll forget it, then freakin' STOP driving. Don't be fumbling
around with any kind of idea-recording technology while you're in motion,
and gently drifting into someone else's lane. If you don't have enough short-term memory to keep the idea current while you find somewhere to come to
a halt, then you've got no chance of success anyway. Bah. Humbug.

Dangerous salesman-induced tricks aside, this is a nice techno-toy. It
fits the Palm V well, it works as advertised, it's useful. Its interface
could be better, but it's quite cheap for what it is. Buttons. A little
light. Visible circuitry. What's not to like?